Homeland’s Crazy, Sexy, Muslim-Baiting Appeal

That’s just what I did when I suggested, however gently,
that the new shows Person of Interest (CBS) and Homeland
(Showtime) might tank for all of their overdone, paranoid
schlock. This is what I wrote last year around this time:

Carrie and Brody on Showtime's "Homeland"

Let’s hope
the reviewers are wrong and like many of today’s best-hyped TV
premiers, these stinkers eventually land in pilot purgatory.

If not, they may
be useful to watch, like looking into a crystal ball into our future.

First, these “stinkers” are, a year later, at the
top of their game, with Person
of Interest, today’s answer to a high-tech “Star
Chamber,” coming in at #5
in the Nielsens (right behind two versions of the pro-cop
NCIS, the faux-geeky Big Bang Theory and football) and
Homeland,
well, it is pretty much the most celebrated drama on TV right
now, earning
four Emmys after only one season in September.

Second, I was right — these shows may be useful to watch, but not necessarily for predicting our “future.” Instead, they tell us how Hollywood continues to cash in on our worst fears and prejudices, today.

Let’s concentrate on Homeland. This heavy drama
(heavy on the acting, action and sex, light on reality) at least attempts to
offer a more sophisticated view of post-9/11 counter-terrorism
efforts in that the government is portrayed as morally and
operationally dysfunctional as we assume it is, at least much of the
time. It actually takes the insanity of the permanent war state to a
whole new level. But the writers’ insistence on portraying
Muslims in such a two-dimensional, diabolical way shows that such
such crude caricaturing is still fair game. On planet Homeland, Muslim
terrorists are not only able to pull off assassinations, bombings
and firefights on U.S. soil, but they infiltrate the media and deploy
a former Marine as a quasi (yet so far amusingly ineffective)
Manchurian candidate. All the critical acclaim suggests — no, demands — that Arab-baiting is necessary in order to produce “serious drama” in Hollywood. Meanwhile, Homeland’s belabored efforts at
presenting the “other side,” which are promising, yet so
tiny that they all but get lost amid the melodrama in this overblown
narrative, lamentably fall short.

Like it or not, the medium imitates, as well as cultivates our
conventional thinking and consumer impulses. It massages and
instructs our beliefs, our biases. If Homeland is the only
drama dealing with post-9/11 counter-terrorism issues head-on, then
it is not only confusing reality but it’s reinforcing old
tropes and bigotries we all needed to shed some time ago.

Bipolar Love and Other Plot Devices

If you have never seen Homeland here is the abridged
set-up: Carrie Mathison, masterfully played by Claire Danes, is a bipolar CIA
officer whose obsessive insistence that returning Marine POW
Nicholas Brody, played by Damian Lewis, has been turned by Arab
terrorists, has paid off: he is a sleeper agent, and he’s
plotting an “attack” in the United States.

Brody is complicated by a few things: he’s a got a hot
wife and two kids who are happy he is home from the war but don’t
know how to deal with his weirdness. We are told, eventually, that
Brody was indeed brainwashed overseas by known jihadist leader Abu
Nazir. Brody’s indoctrination was facilitated by his closeness
to Nazir, who took him out of captivity and brought him back to
health, though no one in the States knew of his whereabouts. During
that time, he tutored Nazir’s young son, who is later killed
in a CIA drone strike. This supposedly compels Brody to convert to
Islam and resign himself to assisting Nazir’s terrorist plot
once back in Washington.

Nazir and friends

Back home, Brody is hailed a hero, and eventually becomes a
hapless puppet of the political machinery. At one point, after
another vet-buddy-turned-terrorist assassinates one of the vice
president’s aides in the middle of the capital, Brody ends up
with the veep in a secured bunker where he comes perilously close to
killing them all with a suicide vest — except a teary phone call
from his teen daughter causes him to abort at the last minute. He
later kills his vet buddy as a test of loyalty to Nazir. Days later,
he is asked to run, and then wins, a seat in the U.S. Congress.

Meanwhile, he has fallen into a brief but plot-changing sexual
relationship with crazy Carrie. The audience never knows whether she
is faking it, falling in love or about to fly off to the booby
hatch. Somehow she does all three – and that is all during
Season 1.

This
season, Brody is running for vice president, his daughter is
involved in a hit and run accident and his jihadi handlers are
putting their final plans into motion. Carrie and her team, which
include a refreshingly sane Saul, played by Mandy Patinkin, finally
nabs Brody. But instead of charging him with treason Bradley
Manning-style, they “turn” him over to their side (we
think) after some cooing from Carrie and a knife through the hand by
another CIA interrogator. Meanwhile a bungled raid in Gettysburg
leaves several CIA agents slaughtered by Arab terrorists and later
on, Brody is kidnapped and brought to Nazir, who somehow slips in
and out of the country at will. Carrie has very loud sex with Brody
while trying to convince him of his patriotism, and the whole thing
is picked up by bugs in the room and broadcast back to Langley like
an adult drive-in movie, yet she maintains a lead role in the task
force. Is she just doing her job, or totally hooked on this Marine dad-turned-Jihadi Joe? We just don’t know.

As a result, there is some effort to suggest that drone strikes that kill innocent civilians can create blowback, and that the government is taking full liberty (no pun intended) with the Patriot Act and is spying on everyone, all of the time. Politicians are duly depicted as ruthless and greedy and cynical. Solitary confinement is recognized as cruel and unusual punishment. Similarly, the Global War on Terror reflects a relentless whack-a-mole operation, where the ends justify the means and anyone who gets caught in the crosshairs is just collateral damage.

That said, in typical Hollywood fashion the government technology is much better than it really is, the agents sexier, the
bureaucratic red-tape non-existent and politics way oversimplified
and cartoonish. Agents and their bosses make wrong snap judgments
all the time and with little consequence. That would require the
normal suspension of disbelief — except where the show engages in
counterproductive stereotyping in order to ramp up the drama week
after week. Then it becomes dangerous.

Here, Muslims are the “other,” dark and swarthy and
almost superhuman in their capabilities to infiltrate Washington and
execute schemes. But they do pray a lot and revere their Qurans.
Terrorists seem to be everywhere. Brody’s contact, a beautiful Arab
girl with an Oxford accent played by Zuleikha
Robinson is a journalist for a reputable television network. She
plots over the phone walking around Lafayette Square near the White
House. In Season 1 her compatriots somehow latched on to Aileen
Morgan, a pretty white American who eventually does time in solitary
– that is, until she slits her throat with a pair of reading
glasses.

There are no “good Muslims” in Homeland,
unless you count Carrie’s informants. Her most recent
interaction with a “friendly,” took place in an episode
over which the Lebanese government is actually threatening
to sue. Seems like officials there take offense to their
cosmopolitan city being portrayed as Thief of Baghdad meets
Raiders of the Lost Ark. Again, the U.S. is seen as posting
snipers and assassinating people in a country for which any such
activity would be not only rare, but illegal. Lebanon has their own
problems right now; anti-American militant summits seem rather low
on the list.

Of course, this is how people like Frank
Gaffney, Pamela
Geller and Robert
Spencer see the world normally: sleeper cells, turncoats,
turbans and knives in the shadows. The Muslim menace is fueled in
Homeland and that is a shame. So is the paranoia that
homegrown terror is a problem our government can barely keep one
step ahead of. Veterans seem to get the short end here, too. The
only war veterans in the show are either cuckoo, drunk or in the
case of family friend Mike who loves Brody’s wife, weak and
ineffectual.

Of course the writers know that it’s the sex and drama that the people want. Watch Frontline if you want a lesson in cultural understanding and the implications of endless war. Plus
the critics love Homeland. It’s not the first to
dramatize real events and caricature the enemy for the sake of
entertainment: James Bond did it all through the Cold War and is
still doing it.

But Homeland is anything but campy, and its material far
more sensitive. It is skewing the real power and authority of the
government. It encourages our neuralgias and picks at our scars.

It’s time to find another enemy to kick around on
television. That’s why I liked the X-Files, where the
real monsters were the federal government and E.T. A lot of time
they were one in the same. Sounds about right. But those times are
gone. Now Hollywood thrives on the dichotomy of mostly good
(government) and all evil (Muslims). It’s the enemy we know,
or at least the one Hollywood writes for us.

Author: Kelley B. Vlahos

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer, is a longtime
political reporter for FoxNews.com and
a contributing editor at The American Conservative.
She is also a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine. Her Twitter account is @KelleyBVlahos.

I love watching it because it is an exciting drama but I am an unlikely candidate for ever trusting my government or hating or fearing Muslims.

However, I never tell any of my friends or acquaintances about this show or recommend to anyone that they watch because, unless one has a properly jaundiced attitude, it is dangerous in that it does promote unhealthy fear of others, Islamophobia, and unrealistic confidence in the values and actions of the US power elite and their agents. Maybe that's why Obama is such a big fan of this show.

One point that the writer did not mention is that this show is based on an Israeli show and has one (or two?) Israeli(s) in prominent production roles. Also, in the plot, the Israelis have recently bombed Iran nuclear without the world in general seeming to have suffered too much blowback from that. One senses that this is somewhat effective Israeli propaganda at work.

I look forward to the new episode each week for the dramatic excitement even though I do not share the values that the shows that the show promotes. I will never encourage anyone to watch this show unless I'm sure they have a very different set of values than the creators of this program.

Andy

One thing reviewers haven't commented on is the extraordinary alliance between Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Brody jumping tall buildings and having x-ray vision would be more believable.

SS Ulrich

It is important to note that this movie is Isareli-based. Note Haaretz' article 'Homeland' is just the beginning for Israeli TV in Hollywood". In line with the neocon agenda, as Norman Podhoretz’ strategy suggested: “But the real world and the world of ideas aren't always in the direct communication they should be. In the world of ideas the major media, the universities, the artistic community all of these are still on the left." They would have to be won over. influence the public. They already had Congress and the White House in their pocket. They have succeeded.

NowMoreThanEver

I think it would be a good idea if you re-designed your comments section to allow the poster to edit their comments. I frequently (like most people) make minor typos or other such editing errors and wish I could go back and fix them. Many others (e.g., Commondreams dot org) have an "edit post" button that allows the poster to go back and fix their mistakes.

If 'Homeland' is only watched by 3 million people living in the US, this is still less than 1% of the population; hardly a mass audience.
The good people in Hollywood might achieve higher ratings were they to stretch their imaginations further and produce a television series, maybe called 'Fatherland', in which a group of Muslim hedonistic apostates living in the US revert to Islam and then hijack four commercial air buses.
These fanatics could suddenly be bestowed with superhuman powers whereby the aeroplanes instantly metamorphasise into missiles. Two of these missiles knock down three skyscrapers in New York. A third could perform a spectacular acrobatic stunt before slamming into the Pentagon, the very heart of the United States defence system.
A nice touch would be if the fourth attack were to be thwarted by the heroic passenger captives who overpower their guards but tragically lose their lives when the plane falls out of the sky and crashes to earth.
Hollywood could even make a feature length film of this final event, considering the human interest element.
The rest would make great TV.

Voluntaryist

No one would believe such nonsense. Well, I didn't anyway. But I didn't believe T. M. was a terrorist. I read his calm, cool demeanor as that of a soldier who was sacrificing himself for his U.S. And when the CIA agent Oswald said: "I'm a patsy.", I believed him. I did not believe Johnson when he told us about the attack at the Gulf of Tongkin. Or Kennedy when he said he knew nothing about the Bay of Pigs. I don't believe Pearl Harbor was a surprise to FDR, or the Maine was sunk by terrorists.

But then I view all gov't, like all churches, as opportunists using superstition for fun & profit. And boy does it work. I feel like I am living in the Matrix but no one else can see it.

John_Muhammad

I haven't seen the show, but based on this review it seems right on the mark. While we're not mowing our lawns or washing our cars or praying or doing laundry or cooking dinner or picking up kid's toys or praying or driving carpool to or from school or cleaning up skinned knees or praying or trying to hold down a decent job or deliver babies or fix computers or put out neighborhood fires, you know exactly what we're doing…

While the women are upstairs all us men- swarthy and thickly bearded and turbaned, every one- are sitting in the basement listening to Radio Tehran and chanting 'Allahu Akbar' while smoking a hookah and sharpening our beheading knives and cleaning our Kalashnikovs and plotting the overthrow of the Western World. We do this EVERY NIGHT until the wee hours of the morning when we…

mow our lawns, wash our cars, do laundry, do our prayers- oh, wait I said all that before. Right, like we've got time to sit around plotting death and destruction. Those Girl Scout cookies don't sell themselves, you know.

The truth is, and most if not all of you here know this, 99.99% of Muslims- and even more so in the US- are just.like.you. We have the same dreams and aspirations, for the most part, and almost never- except in the very rare celebrated incidents- do those dreams and aspirations involve harming anyone or anything. I know the men at my mosque pretty well, and I can say with confidence that about the only thing they could terrorize would be a free salad bar.

As a white American male- and a Muslim- I have to laugh at the anti-Muslim hysteria sometimes, I really do. If we were a fraction as vicious and crafty as people thought we were, do you really think the Middle East would be in the shape it's in? Really? The fact is, Muslims in America are roughly where the blacks were in the opening or ending stages of the Civil Rights era- it's either not as bad now as it's going to get, or the worst is over and we're gaining acceptance. Every group, ethnic or religious, has had the same rite of passage- demonization followed by acceptance and integration- and Muslims and Islam is proving to be no different in America.

ML3

Entertaining comment and right on the money as always, John.
Der Homeland = realistic drama for uninformed American idiots.

Phil Giraldi

I turned it off last season shortly after I saw the notice on the screen that the series was based on an Israeli original. I have been watching Boardwalk Empire instead, where the greed and corruption are much more plausibly rendered.

Outsider

As I don't subscribe, I'm unable watch any of the shows on premium tv (unless I get an occasional free weekend). In my opinion, HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, etc are just not worth the extra money! My Directv bill is already far too high!

Guest

I guess you miss All American Muslim. LOL Homeland is a great, realistic show and was not cancelled for lack of interest like AAM. Speaks volumes – more than your apologisitc article.

Mike Ehling

I wonder if, half a century from now, "Homeland" will be getting the same kind of reviews that 1949's "The Red Menace" (imdb.com/title/tt0041791) gets today.

I've not seen these shows: I'm still tryna get thru my DVR'd "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy."

MoT

Why not rehash an old show from the last century. We'll call it "Heimat" with the illustrious and all patriotic Gestapo hunting down and corralling all those suspicious looking Juden and their co-conspirators.

All sarcasm aside the story above paints the picture we have today of this nations attitudinal psychosis. To think that nearly forty hours weekly are poured into being conditioned like so many lab rats is disgusting. Thank god I don't waste that kind of time self-medicating on Leviathans kool-aid.

Donald

"It’s time to find another enemy to kick around on television." I really don't think we need any other enemies to kick around. We have enough of an enemy in the Muslim terrorists in this country. Their agenda is to take over this country and institute sharia law.The muslims along with their friends, the U.N. only want our money and our country. They must be running out of virgins over there.

ML3

Muslim terrorists should take over our banks and make them all interest-free. Usury is a Hebraic concept.

Guest

You'd probably also love to give our country away and be under Sharia.

Laughable that an OR ('other rank' – Brody is a sergeant) would ever be groomed for national public office in any capacity whatsoever (can anybody find a former .mil member of Congress in US history who wasn't AT LEAST a Captain?).

Laughable that people have conversations in Congressional offices as if they think such places are entirely free of audiovisual surveillance (and that Estes' office at Langley is a 'blind spot' wherein Brody can exfiltrate key encryption codes without being detected).

Laughable that a CIA field operative can have a bi-polar personality disorder without being detected (sign on with CIA, and they gets all up in y'alls bidness).

It's also laughable that nobody (in the show) mentions that Brody's wife looks Persian (the lady who plays her – Morena Baccarin – is actually Brazilian).

(And let's just say if there has been a single USMC sergeant with a wife that hot, the USMC would have run an ad about it).

Could be worse – it could be as bad as 'Revolution' where, supposedly 15 years after the collapse of society, all the major male characters show no signs of find no difficulty finding supplies of "Just for Men" (and all of the female characters have perfectly groomed eyebrows).

And even worse: imagine if it was as bad as 'Rubicon' – where CIA analysts are selfless, motivated, non-careerist polymath philosopher-Jedis.

ML3

its a show for scaring // entertaining the AARP crowd. How hard can that be?

Brody4President

Hmmm, is Brody a "good Muslim"? Or, did this writer forget that he's Muslim because that didn't conveniently fit her argument. Brody's conversion to Islam is generally presented as something that has helped him and made his life better. Even if politically inconvenient to him.

Its a complicated show. It also has as a major driving force the fact that Brody watched a young boy he was fond of get killed by a US drone missile strike while the boy was walking to school. When this writer says 'there are no good muslims', she's obviously selectively forgotten this boy.

Its a complicated show, with good writing that comes at this from all sorts of angles and directions. If you only cherry pick a few to write about, then its easy to be critical. Harder if you really pay attention and actually pick up on all the different aspects of this show. Its good writing with writers coming at this question of terror, terrorism, surveillance etc from all sorts of different angles. Sorry if its too complicated for this writer, but she obviously can't handle a show that doesn't just echo her viewpoints back to her 100%

Richard Steven Hack

The show is really well done, with great acting from everyone and good direction, even if occasionally the acting gets somewhat over the top and the pace is sometimes slow and some of the side events, such as the daughter's car incident, are irrelevant to the main story.

Everything in it is fairly plausible if you've read any of the CIA tell-all books. Weird stuff happens all the time in intelligence circles and many of the people in the intelligence community are not exactly "normal."

However, I did find the heavily armed and equipped terrorist attack on the tailor shop to be mostly ridiculous. Those guys had more gear than the usual SWAT team. If terrorists had that capability, why waste time with bombs? Just run around shooting people – it would be much more effective.

Yes, it's based on an Israeli show and yes it's full of Muslim-bashing. Big surprise…not. Thirty years ago it was Asians, especially Vietnamese (anyone remember Chuck Norris' movies?), or Russians. Forty years ago it was Germans. There's always an ethnicity Hollywood can dump on – as long as it isn't Jews.

The main problem I had with this season was the notion that bombing Iran's nuclear facilities (referenced in background on the show) would not cause massive civilian casualties. Brody explicitly calls Iran's claims of 3,000 casualties "BS". In fact, the casualties would be more in line with 10-50,000 and potentially more.

The main problem with that background is that it was obviously inserted to suggest that Israel can and should attack Iran's nuclear facilities – and not just that it was likely or to serve as justification for the Nazir planned attack. I think it was clearly intended as propaganda.

What's amusing is that Zuleikha Robinson's first name is Persian for "someone beautiful." She was one of the stars of the Lone Gunman spin-off of the X-Files – the show that predicted the 9/11 attack six months before it actually occurred.

Like most Hollywood shows, "Homeland" is textbook of fears, obsessions, hatreds and jealousies of the movie capital's elite:

1 – The American military. Never has there been more hoop-jumping in media to promote our Mideast wars and at the same time present the military that fights it as epitome of human evil. In the L.A. basin, Vietnam never ended, man.

3 – Arabs. They hate Israel. Case closed. On the other hand, it's praiseworthy Arabs hate America – because everyone knows what they REALLY hate are white-bread American Nazis. And as we know from above, that's OK. (Odd, too, since we're so dumb and characterless we easily hook up with Islamics, bumbling 'militia' schemes, skinhead racism and everything else on the SPLC blacklist. …It's almost like hating Hello, Kitty.)

4 – America. It's better to be a parent-hating, fast-car-driving, unshaven, obsessively rude and obnoxious, ostentatiously affluent 'rebel' than give ANY allegiance to this evil, Nazi, irredeemably English-speaking nation. Know what? It's better to be an Arab than show anything but contempt for America.

Someone effectively, accurately slagged a long-ago Debra Winger movie called "Betrayed" as "effete, wealthy Leftists' nightmare of getting a flat tire in farm-belt Middle America." That description also sums up Hollywood's vision of everything not themselves. If their foes' humanity could be recognized, these outlanders would be termed Tinseltown's 'Others'.

Really, does this piece of propaganda trash that passes for "entertainment" merit anyone's serious analysis? It's akin to analyzing "art" from the Nazi era in Germany or the old USSR for meaning or depth: in other words, a waste of time and energy.

We already know that Amoricons are some of the most intellectually stunted and shallow creatures on earth and that the television programming they focus their attention on reflects this fact. Do we really need to look under the hood at the details?

David Smith

Fifty years ago, the same story lines were playing, but the villains were Communists. Anybody remember "I Led Three Lives"? Now it is Muslims. Fifty years from now, it will be somebody else. The cast changes, but the story stays the same.

Homeland started with a great hook. Showing how the U.S. murders indiscriminately with drones and creates terrorists was something every American needs to think about. Also, showing the U.S. denying the attack was another wake up call. Why would anyone deny doing the right thing? This was my main complaint about the show: Mission Impossible. The U.S. sent in agents but told them if they got caught they would not be helped or acknowledged. Why? Were they acting immorally? Of course not. But they were violating International Law and that was more important than right or wrong.

richard vajs

I am old enough to remember a similiar TV show from the 50s – "I Led Three Lives", which was premised that somehow suburan "nobodies" getting together clansdestinely to discuss Communist Party philosophy was a major threat to America. The protanganist was said to "lead three lives" because he was simultaneously an ordinary ad executive, a Communist and a government informer. As far as I remember, the "Communist Ring" never actually did a damn thing except talk and conspire against each other. To get anything out of the farce, the viewer had to have a boogeyman inside his own skull.

mew mew

When the news if full of so much crap, it's helpful to have dramatic tv shows to help massage the narratives into peoples brains. That's what they think anyway. It's amazing how well some of these shows seem to shadow actual events, there must be some kind of direction going on with the plots and stories, somehow.

My new favorite is "Last Resort", about nuking Pakistan and the sub captain that wouldn't, so he takes over an island with his sub fully loaded with nuclear weapons. Good times.